By David Glenn Cox
We all have different hopes and dreams, we are all different people from different backgrounds. We all live in an age of mass communication that rather than uniting us, divides us further still. We will never reach unanimity on many issues but our adherence to fringe issues weakens our ability to form an effective coalition.
It really doesn’t matter if you are black or white, gay or straight if you can’t find a job. It really doesn’t matter if you are black or white, gay or straight if the bank is foreclosing on your house. Nor does it matter if you are a Democrat or a Republican when the company strips your benefits or guts your pension.
Some things are very easy to understand, If you have ten people and one job wages fall. If you have ten jobs and one person wages rise. If you base your economy on a fuel unavailable locally, you will pay for it in blood. If you deregulate Capitalism, Capitalism will destroy itself. If you allow Capitalism to run roughshod it will destroy society itself.
We are living in an age of a rapidly encroaching police state where your rights are meaningless. George W. Bush was correct about the constitution when he said, “its just a god damned piece of paper.” You must be x-rayed or groped to get on an aircraft and travel. The government may deny you that right without due process. The week before thanksgiving the TSA arrested fourteen Americans for acting suspiciously in airports.
What exactly is the legal definition of acting suspiciously? What differentiates eccentric behavior from suspicious? Is walking on your hands in line suspicious or eccentric? Is complaining loudly about an encroaching police state suspicious? Only a trained TSA official can tell for sure. It is obvious that the rough and public groping by TSA officers is a compliance tactic. “You don’t want any trouble, do you sir? So just walk through the machine like you’re told or we will molest you. One more word out of you sir, might constitute suspicious behavior.”
There is a line crossed when in search of criminals they treat everyone as suspected criminals. Many police forces have lost all pretense of public safety. They drive around in black cars with the windows blacked out, you can be stopped for any suspected infraction. If you refuse compliance to a search of your vehicle or questioning, you are acting suspiciously. If you become angry you will be arrested, in one case, a man was charged with nonviolent resisting arrest for covering his face as the police beat him. What we used to call resisting assault.
We can all agree that this type of behavior is wrong, not as liberals or conservatives but because this type of behavior is infectious. It breeds and manifests itself as it grows, suddenly kids skateboarding are being tasered. Pregnant women are tasered. In Los Angeles, police entered a backyard party because of a noise complaint. The homeowner complained when police opened and entered his property through the back gate without his permission. His wife was pushed to the ground and the homeowner was tasered by police. A video camera running at the time showed the event as a Sunday afternoon christening party for their two year old daughter. Freedom lost is not easily regained.
Malcolm X said, “Power never takes a back step only in the face of more power.”
We are living in an era of defective government, of government that has lost even the basic semblance of care or concern for the well being of its people. If you earned more than a million dollars per year, since 1980 you have received a 42 percent federal tax cut. If you earned $15,000 per year you have received nothing! Nothing except, zero wage growth, rising state and local taxes and a blank darkened future.
Our political parties have lost all meaning, with Republicans and Neo-Republicans. A Democratic President who supports tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for industry and increased oil drilling in the Gulf, and even eighteen million dollars in his green initiative to help the world’s richest corporations develop better oil drilling bits. A jobs program that gives tax cuts to employers and nothing to the unemployed. Passing the buck, “Say, if you guys do something about unemployment for me, we’ll give you a tax cut!”
The federal government signed half a billion dollars in loan guarantees for an American solar cell company to build a state of the art factory. The company then closed their old factory and laid off the workers siting increased competition from Chinese solar cell manufacturers. The Chinese solar cell manufactures are underwritten by the state and will never be required to show a profit until they have captured the lion’s share of the market.
This isn’t about trade, this is about sanity, about a government’s sovereign duty to it’s people. It isn’t left wing or right wing, it isn’t gay or straight or white or black.
The defense budget has doubled six times in twenty years, the peace dividend has become the war deficit. All to defend ourselves from invisible, nameless terrorists. Do you know what they they called opponents during the French revolution? Terrorists. Do you know what Hitler called Churchill and Roosevelt? Terrorists! It is a term without definition, it is cloudy and murky and can mean whatever the state wants it to mean, just like suspicious behavior.
The US treasury estimates that sixty billion dollars in tax revenue is avoided by Corporate America each year. The President’s response is to impanel a commission to see what can be done to cut entitlements.
Your government is declaring war upon you!
It is a government’s primary responsibility to protect and to maintain it’s people.
It is also their responsibility to collect taxes from all who owe them and to close tax loop holes that lets revenue escape. Failing to do these things constitutes suspicious behavior.
Ronald Reagan cut Social Security, Bill Clinton cut welfare benefits for America’s poor. George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security and now Barack Obama hosts a phony panel to cut Social Security yet again. Do you see a recurring theme here? Endless crisis requiring endless concessions, perpetual war, perpetual enemies. The US literally rings Iran with military bases and then claims Iran is a threat to the region.
The US and South Korea play war games close to disputed territory in a volital region without a peace treaty, only a cease fire. North Korea begins shelling and the US and South Korea call it provocative. The Wiki leaks make clear that our foreign policy is completely corrupt. Protection is for sale, be you butcher or statesman. It illustrates that if our foreign policy is so corrupt so then our domestic policy is corrupt as well.
Barack Obama once again cries uncle to Republican pressure and concedes another $700 billion to America’s wealthy. Remember, these are the Bush tax cuts and apparently it never occurred to Mr. Obama to have developed the Obama tax cuts. A progressive program for those earning under $100,000 to be paid for by those earning over one million dollars. This is all stage craft, these are giveaways, bribes, buying your silence. We don’t actually have this money, we must borrow it.
When the TV lights go down they’re all friends up on Capital hill. Pals and buddies eating and drinking at the same banquets. Cashing checks from the same donors. They’re putting on a show right now called, “We Don’t Like What the President’s Doing!” Congressional Democrats voted down the President’s compromise, capitulation, sell out, sham deal. Now they go to work on stage to express their outrage. Meanwhile, they make side deals and add ons.
They are saying in effect, “Mr. President, I’m morally outraged by this and cannot possibly support this bill under any conditions, unless I’m allowed to wet my beak.”
A fiscally unsound bill that will add another $3 trillion dollars to the deficit. Of that total more than 25 percent will be going to America’s wealthiest three percent. Seven hundred billion dollars divided by 150,000 wealthy families with the remaining $2.3 trillion divided among 300 million Americans.
President Obama then pays homage to his spiritual mentor Richard Nixon with a line that would make even Richard Milhous Nixon blush. If Congress doesn’t pass this bill it could force the economy into another recession. This country is in a prolonged economic depression. It is not getting better, it is getting worse! Tax cuts and tax give always helped spawn it and now the President warns without more gasoline on the fire it will get worse. The professional wrestlers and Hollywood actors in Congress will gladly throw the budget to the four winds for a price. Meanwhile they plan cuts for the poor and the elderly, the sick and the defenseless.
You cannot resist this with force, they will call you a terrorist and lock you away. You cannot resist by writing letters, anymore than you can talk a shark out of eating you. You can only refuse to participate, to take your money out of the bank, tell the cable company to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine. To not use credit and to not purchase anything unless absolutely necessary and even then to only buy the minimum.
We makes this economy go and we can make it stop! We can start with core principles that apply to us all regardless of race, creed or gender.
We are one people!
The wars must stop!
The people need jobs!
Taxes must be paid by those who can afford to pay them!
We need a massive and national alternative energy program!
It is government sworn duty and sole obligation to maintain the well being of the populace!
When it fails to do so it becomes a tyranny. They have the guns but we have the numbers.
“And knowing that my mother in there was a statistic that didn’t have to be, that existed because of society’s failure, hypocrisy, greed and lack of mercy and compassion. Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight,” Malcolm X